I was capable of feeling hatred and anger–but incapable of feeling rage.

I didn’t become capable of feeling rage until my twenties.

Yet then it was too late.

How well rage would have served me in my childhood–it would have protected me from my dad’s physical abuse, and my mom’s support, even encouragement of it.

How well rage would have served me in my adolescence–it would have protected me from the verbal bullying of white boys and the physical bullying of black boys.

And all day I’ve wished my mind could travel to my thirteen-year-old body in 1979, and possess it–so that my forty-eight-year-old rage could rise in defiance of my abusive parents and my bullying peers.

Yet my mind is still here, of course.

And it is filled with rage–but rage against far more powerful forces than abusive parents or bullying teenagers.

Rage against things over which I have no power at all.

Rage against my mental illness, and my deteriorating life.

But even moreso:

Rage against this, the worst era in human history–rage against digital-age technology, rage against exponentially increasing overpopulation, rage against climate change, and rage against every other evil that is the beginning of the end of the world.

I’ve never been so overwhelmed with such overwhelming problems in my life.

And I was planning to write a post contradicting a Bible verse that I’ve just found does not even exist.

In the past, my mom has told me the Apostle Paul wrote that God would not give us more problems than we could bear.

I never liked Paul, even when I was a devout Christian–so many of his teachings contradicted Jesus’ teachings!

So I was going to especially take pleasure in contradicting Paul!

But I first had to find the Bible verse on which my mom’s claim (probably something she had heard from someone else) was based.

And I’ve found it.

And in fairness to Paul, it does not state that God will not give us more problems than we can bear.

It’s 1 Corinthians 10 : 13, and it reads thus:

“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

In other words, according to Paul, God will not give us more temptation than we can bear. Not problems, but temptation.